The Applicant has developed a wide range of printers that use pagewidth printheads instead of traditional reciprocating printhead designs. The pagewidth designs increase print speeds as the printhead does not traverse back and forth across the page to deposit a line of an image. The pagewidth printhead simply deposits the ink on the media as it moves past at high speeds. Such printheads have made it possible to perform 1600 dpi resolution printing at speeds in the vicinity of 60 pages per minute; speeds previously not attainable with conventional inkjet printers.
The high print speeds require a large ink supply flowrate. Not only are the flow rates higher but distributing the ink along the entire length of a pagewidth printhead is more complex than feeding ink to a relatively small reciprocating printhead.
To prolong the life of the printhead, most inkjet printers will incorporate some type of maintenance facility. This may be as simple as capping the printhead when it is not in use. Capping a printhead will stop the ink on the nozzles from drying out. However it does not clean any paper dust or other contaminants that may have adhered to be nozzle face. The most effective way to remove these particles is by wiping the nozzle face with a suitable surface. Removing the dust and contaminants using a wiping surface cleans the nozzle face but eventually the wiping surface itself will need to be cleaned. The Applicant has developed a printhead maintenance facility with an absorbent pad to clean the wiping surface, but the ordinary worker will appreciate that cleaning wiping surface is not required every time the nozzle face is wiped. Similarly, the wiping surface may be adequately cleaned by a single traverse across the absorbent pad. However in other cases, it will need to be drawn across the absorbent pad several times.
In conventional printers, the maintenance regime from the printhead is a set of steps that are carried out in a predetermined order. If just one of those steps needs to be repeated, the printer repeats the entire maintenance regime. This extends the time required to adequately clean the printhead and can be excessively wasteful if the nozzles purge ink unnecessarily.